From staff reports

A delegation of 14 Kenyan women will visit LaGrange on Tuesday as part of the Women of the Maasai Empowerment and Networks Project. The women will meet with City Council members at City Hall, attend a luncheon with local women leaders at the Chamber of Commerce, and tour the Whitesville Road Elementary School.

The project, which is coordinated by the University of Georgia Carl Vinson Institute of Government’s International Center through a grant from the U.S. Department of State, exposes the women to a range of civic experiences. The delegation arrived in Georgia March 7 and will stay through March 27, also spending time in Athens, Atlanta and Savannah.

The visiting Kenyan women are all Maasai, a seminomadic, herding people living across parts of southern Kenya and northern Tanzania. Maasai society is often male-dominated, and the Women of the Maasai project seeks to empower the visiting Kenyan women through their experiences in America.

“The women participating in the project come from different backgrounds in Kenya – urban and rural areas alike will be represented in the delegation,” said Vinson Institute project coordinator Njeri Marekia-Cleaveland, “but they all share an involvement in small business development in their country. We hope that this project will enable the women to be more active participants in their civil society.”

While in the United States, the women are engaging in discussions with American business and government leaders, many of them women. LaGrange City Councilwoman Norma Tucker is coordinating the local visit and hopes to involve a wide variety of local women.

“I am very excited about this opportunity,” Tucker said. “It should be a learning experience for us as well as for the visitors from Kenya.”

Cultural experiences also play a significant role in the project. While in Athens, the women stayed in local homes instead of hotels, enabling them to gain a more personal connection with their hosts. Other Georgians will open their homes for dinners and teas honoring the visitors.

The Kenyan delegation will visit the DeKalb Farmers Market, the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial, and the CNN Center in Atlanta and the AIDS quilt and an ecological conservation project in Savannah.

This is the second group of Kenyan women to travel to Georgia as part of the Women of the Maasai project. The Vinson Institute hosted a delegation of 28 in spring of 2008. Following that visit, a group of eight Athens women traveled to Kenya with two Vinson Institute faculty members to meet with Kenyan women working in government and nonprofits.